At the end of August, I shared an email from a reader. They suggested that New Hampshire’s choice of tax policies was somehow tied to a series of business failures (some pending), one of which was Brookstone, a niche specialty items chain that has corporate offices in Merrimack (ack-ack), New Hampshire.
Brookstone is failing, yes. But is it New Hampshire’s fault?
The bulk of Brookstone’s brick and mortar retail outlets are in Malls with a smattering of locations in airports. Its products are a mostly higher-end set of quirky items with nearly no mass appeal. So, it is a niche or specialty concern operating out of some of the most expensive commercial spaces located in the retail cemeteries formerly known as shopping malls.
Creative destruction is not New Hampshire’s fault, nor does it have anything to do with tax policy. The free-market landscape shifts continuously. Brookstone has fallen, and it can’t get up.
Changing New Hampshire’s tax policy, one that year-after-year keeps its overall tax burden one of the lowest in the nation would have no impact at all on the solvency of Brookstone.
None. Not now, not ever. But looking forward, as we are told we must, one of the few policy changes that could help a business in New Hampshire is energy policy. But the New Hampshire legislature appears poised to do precisely the opposite of that which would attract new business.
New Hampshire has a lot to offer, but high energy costs are still prohibitive. Governor Sununu vetoed two pieces of legislation that would make electricity cost (even) more by using regulatory force to reward more expensive and inefficient sources at the expense of ratepayers, including job creators.
Should we also tax citizens and other businesses to prop up failing retail concerns selling products no one wants (in locations no one goes) because they happen to have operating space in the Granite State?
No. But here we are, doing exactly that. Because someone who thinks they know better believes that the Brookstone of energy generation, New Hampshire’s expensive and unaffordable biomass plants (and the handful of jobs they support) need to be saved at the expense of everyone else (and jobs in every other industry) affected by prices driven higher by legislative fiat.
They do not need not be saved.
Let them fail so that the market can 1) fill the void with something that works. 2) the biomass industry will be forced to find ways to compete that do not include lobbying the legislature to rob the people of New Hampshire to prop them up. And 3) the people they once employed can find productive jobs that add to the state’s economy instead of sucking it of resources.
Pro-tip. Don’t apply at Brookstone.
